Yes, you are correct. Back in the old days, we did get to vote on some fund directors. Not any more.
Alas, we’ve been there for some time.
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Warren Buffet said that when he died, he wanted almost all his wife’s money put into an S&P ETF like SPY or one of the big brokers equivalent. If you see the results of doing that over the years, you will see it is very hard for any of us to beat the returns from the whole market. Look at the $1M bet he made and won by huge margins about beating the hedge funds.
People are by nature herd animals. It is hard to go contrary to the crowd.
Think you might have been laughed out of a party in 2007 if you warned people about losing their shirts on leveraged real estate?
How about if you told friends you were shorting telecom and tech stocks in 1999?
It is easy to see mistakes, but only in retrospect. There is comfort in everyone agreeing with you, until all are proved wrong. Buffet, Soros, and Templeton are rare humans.
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Yes but…
He made this statement long in the past. At this point in time, the herding behavior is taking place around the S&P500 because of the Magnificent Seven. Seven stocks are doing great, 493 are not. That’s not a well market. I hang around on Reddit too much, I read all of the relatively young people (let’s say 18-40 years old) cheerily chirp about “VOO and chill”. This is the worst herding I’ve seen in a while. This cohort doesn’t know what they don’t know. Which is… stocks can suck for a long, long time, and most people will abandon their plan and panic sell near the bottom. That’s not a prediction… that’s an observation.
Do I own S&P500? Yes. Is that the only stock index ETF I own? Not by a long shot.
Heads up… the S&P500 is not “the market”. It’s a collection of 500 stocks chosen by a committee, which are the highest market capitalization… not the highest company intrinsic value, or sales, or other operational measure… the weighting comes from the stock price.
So if WallStreetBets decides to go after some rando stock in the S&P500 and its price surges, it becomes a bigger and bigger piece of the index. The S&P500 market cap index is an automatic performance chasing mechanism (but no one thinks that - they think it’s “the market”, because they parrot what everyone else says without really knowing better).
There are other ways to build a fund index, like equal weights. Every company slice is 1/500. RSP does not suffer from market cap performance chasing. But it hasn’t done as well recently. Why? Because investors are herding and performance chasing right now. But RSP does beat SPY over the long term… 0.60% per year better. That’s noticeable.
Also what about MidCap, SmallCap? Examples of Mid-Cap companies. These are not in the S&P500.
Alcoa
Avis Budget
Crocs
Nordstrom
Williams-Sonoma
Wingstop Inc. (WING)
Celsius Holdings Inc. (CELH)
Consol Energy
Duolingo
Abercrombie & Fitch
Probably VTI is better than VOO, but the impact of Small and MidCap is so small because of the gigantic influence of Market Cap weighting and Mag Seven on the fund it’s better to explicitly have positions in small and mid caps in addition to VOO or VTI.
I know that’s not what people have been told, or want to hear… but those are the facts as I see them. My real point is… understand what you buy. Make your own decisions based on facts. Don’t just go with the herd. Be a smart consumer. READ THE DISCLOSURES and research the technical jargon at a place like Investopedia.
Very wise word printed above. What has really changed in 60 years?
In the mid 1960s small investors were told not to trouble themselves with stock picking, but just buy the “Nifty Fifty” big caps of the time. All were supposedly can’t-lose stocks- the Magnificent Seven of their time with 43 more.
Among them was Xerox and Land Corporation, inventor of Polaroid cameras. Where are these shining stars now?
POMIX is one total market index that includes, small, medium, and large cap. It was commission free at Ameritrade, but no longer now that Schwab bought Ameritrade.
I’ll take the dartboard… any day. 
Thanks for the info on reddit; I didn’t know that young people are jumping on VOO. But if I had just followed Buffett’s advice, I would be much, much better off than I am now. And, knowing that, I still try to pick stocks!
I’m sure Clark reads this board to get ideas for the podcast… today he’s talking about “recency bias”.